Guto Lacaz

In 1978 wins the award “Objeto Inusitado – Arte Aplicada” (Paço das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil) and starts his career as a visual artist. In 1982 has his first solo exhibition “Idéias Modernas”, at São Paulo Gallery (São Paulo, Brazil). In 1983 the “Eletro Performance” at the 18th São Paulo Biennial, and in 1986 “Eletro Esfero Espaço”, at the exhibition “A Trama do Gosto”. In 1989 floating ensemble “Auditório para questões delicadas”, at the Ibirapuera lake and “Cosmos – um passeio no infinito”, at MASP (São Paulo, Brazil).

In 2014 participates in the 3rd Bahia Biennial with the work “Saravá, Espiral Cinética” for the Elevator Lacerda (Salvador, Brazil). Inaugurates his second public sculpture: “Ulysses, o elefante biruta”, at the Pedreira do Chapadão Park in Campinas, Brazil. In 2015 presents the kinetic sculpture “pororoca” at the exhibition “As Margens dos Mares”, at Sesc Pinheiros, the urban intervention “ALEX ALEX”, at CCSP and the performance “Ludo Voo” at the University Centre Maria Antonia (São Paulo, Brazil).

Guto Lacaz is a distinctive and unique presence in the Brazilian contemporary art scene.
His multimedia approach to subjects that deal with technological paraphernalia is intelligent, ironic and conceptually consistent.
lt is also coherent with the variery of places, and situations where Guto presents his works: from galleries and museums to theatre, public spaces and television channels.
I really appreciate the irony of his installations, where hes radically and poetically transforms the uses and functions of daily objects.
The performances are for sure among his more strong ans original accomplishments.
In them Guto manipulates a lot of incredible objects and presents himself like an amazing mixture of artist- actor. inventor and magician.
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Regina Silveira – Artist – Professor PHD – Universidade de São Paulo – Brazil.

Walking across the Viaduto do Chá (a viaduct in São Paulo) has never been a pleasant experience. The worst beggars in the city – in other words, the most ill, with the most striking physical deformities – are concentrated there next to the very sad street vendors. Hence, artist Guto Lacaz has installed an immense periscope at the Eletropaulo building. Everything changed since last Saturday.Sparse reactions were produced. Guto Lacaz’s periscope connects the ground floor to the building’s fifth floor, where other works of art await the visitor. You are on the street and can see, thanks to a gigantic optical device, the people in the building. It initially seems to be a mirror. The group of people on the ground floor is also looking at the image of a group of people. The people who are in the fifth floor of the building are the ones who have gathered, as you have on the street, to see themselves, at the same time different and the same.

I came out of the experience feeling happier, lighter and more human. Each person on the ground floor feels like communicating with the group watching him/her from the fifth floor. Beautiful events are produced. Someone risks a wave to those who are on the ground floor. The wave is acknowledged and replied. A homeless kid on the ground floor asks for a cigarette from the group on the fifth floor. No problem: someone throws the cigarette and it tumbles from above. Other kids, on the fifth floor, pretend to be committing suicide with tragic gestures. The trick is not difficult. They lower themselves, thus escaping from the mirror’s visual field; those on the ground floor believe that the person has disappeared or jumped. One might pause to think about the subtle paradox involving this work of art by Guto Lacaz. The periscope enables an attempt to communicate between people who do not know each other – while it prevents any form of verbal communication. You cannot hear anything that is said on the fifth floor: you can only communicate through gestures, like children that wave from the back window of a car and we respond.

Childishness, of course, constitutes the key for Guto Lacaz’s work. It would be unfair to classify him as a “plastic artist”, a word that applies to all types of deception. He is a type of a mad inventor. The gadgets he builds are not however, only an exercise in performance humor, of this heavy and sinister sarcasm that afflicts avant-garde when irony and destructiveness is intended. What is best about Guto Lacaz is that he knows how to maintain the gratuitous purity, the childishness in his work. And in childishness, there is a vocation for humanity. That’s why we say, “all people are born equal”, in other words; they are equal before society imposes class differences. Differences that Guto Lacaz dissipates in his work, by making all of us become dazzled children, waving to each other through his periscope, in the distance miraculously overcome without words, between those below and those on the fifth floor. And the whole miracle is performed without words. In this sense, the utopia of “plastic arts” comes to life. Of course that in an ephemeral manner – but a transfiguration of personal relationships in the City was accomplished, by means of this artifact, Guto Lacaz. Georg Simmel, the German sociologist, commented on the extreme inhumanity that exists in large metropolis. People are crowded in buses, are closer than they’ve ever been, but they do not exchange words, they don’t communicate, a perverse and impersonal union, therefore. We are all more together than we have ever been and we become separate in this intimacy.

The event promoted by the state’s Department of Culture intends to show, on the contrary, the “flows” of the city. The commercial exchanges, traffic, mobility, passage. Lacaz radicalized this idea of “passage” and of flow making the transportation of people through a periscope instantaneous and magical. There would still be a lot to talk about the exhibition. Many things at the City Art exhibition deserve to be commented. Of course, I didn’t like everything. Despite this, reserving space for another article, I preferred to only talk about Guto Lacaz. Is he nonsensical, mad hatter, random? Perhaps he is all these things. But, if he can manage a feat such as his installation on the Viaduto do Chá and he delights us with it because his madness isn’t really that nonsensical and the gratuitousness he produces, elevates us, like a periscope, instantaneous and graceful, to heights which, who knows, may be our own: the heights that exist when we are simply human.

P.S. 1 – In a compliment to gratuitousness, I paid tribute to Guto Lacaz. Join the first letter of each paragraph and Guto Lacaz’s periscope will appear. It was a silly, inconsequential exercise, but after all, Guto himself gives us the right to become children every now and then.
P.S. 2 – Silvio Lancellotti sent me a very nice fax agreeing with what I said about Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo in the “Ilustrada” (column) of September 16. He corrected as to the origins of the “Peach Melba”; details on page 125 of his book “The Classic Kitchen” (Art Editora), which every person of culture should read.
P.S. 3 – A reader called my attention as to a typing mistake in my article of August 19 about Rudolph Valentino. The movie that I was commenting (“The Eagle“) was not based on an unfinished novel by “Punchio”, but of Puchkin (1799-1837). Caio Fernando Abreu published in the “Caderno 2” column of the “O Estado de S. Paulo” (newspaper), and article in which he reveals that he is HIV Positive. The article, secretly announced in two previous chronicles, is very beautiful. It avoids any facilitation
on the theme: it isn’t tragic, it isn’t sensationalistic, there is no self-commiseration, it does not ask for pity. It is the word of a dignified and brave person; it is the text of a writer and a man.

Guto Lacaz is above all a magician. A magician or a mage? He deals with shapes, and at the same time, the shapes deal with him. I know that he is a dream weaver. He has the terrible innocence of the genius and of the angels that rebel against routine. During the Middle Ages he would have caused perplexity to the doctors of the Sorbonne and would be able to cross the fires of the Inquisition in the bilge of his inventions. During Romanticism he would be the man of the barricades or an inhabitant of supernatural domains. He possesses a curious symbiosis of mysticism and science. He deals with the elements with the religiosity of an alchemist and the inquisitive spirit of quantum mechanics. Sometimes he is the troubadour of the lost castle; other times, he is the boy who invents, in his backyard, the trap to capture clouds. He takes life seriously in a ludic manner. He knows that we are chess pieces and offers a ring to the hand that plays with our fate. This is my friend Guto Lacaz.